On 26/01/2014 00:16, Doctor McKay wrote:
If you're going to accuse someone
I wasn't accusing anyone of anything.
, at least accuse the right person. Lotus
is the community that has the "LIVE NUDES!" tag not, Skial. At the same
time, why on Earth do you care? Are they stealing traffic from your own
live nude servers?
It was a joke. I am a bit dismayed because my skial joke in response
to the same quote would have probably been better.
Joining *and continuing to play on* a server is a vote for that server.
No it isn't. As I said in my other reply. I've played on pretty much
every "name"
server you can mention that has a presence in the UK or EU - skial, lotus,
multiplay, saigns, valve, etc etc etc. I've connected to them directly
and I've connected
to them more than once and that is not because I think they do things well
or are good.
Not by a long way.
They nearly all suck in various different ways. Some more than others.
I notice Valve have got many of you running servers that
accept quickplay players. In doing that many have removed a fair amount
of things that made their servers really suck.
So if you're sat there counting how many players you have
thinking you must be doing something great, I'd reassess that.
TF2 is the great thing - and if you're getting Quickplay players
that's often because of Valve's idea to stop the game sucking.
Servers get away with it because
(A) How good a server is, is down to the people on it, not the admin
which means throughout the day a server can go from great
to completely rubbish, all out of the admin's control.
and
(B) Because if everyone sucks, there's nowhere better for anyone to go
anyway. Sometimes you play for an hour shooting a few people just to mess
around, most of the faults on the server cease to matter but
counting page hits on a website or joiners on a server as votes of
confidence
is a mistake.
You can guarantee if one of you has an idea to make your servers
suck a bit more than the others, the others will soon copy it. Thus
ensuring you
won't become better than the others even if they try to help you by getting
worse.
You clearly don't understand how a default works. As Bottiger said,
this is the same thing that happened with IE in the earlier days of
the Web.
No it isn't, it's not the same at all.
For one thing, the reason people stopped using netscape was
because it became a bloated buggy mess.
Netscape cried, and eventually started writing
an open source version, which was a bloated buggy mess too.
Eventually someone with half a brain cell at netscape
released firefox (albeit it wasn't called firefox at first) that was
less bloated and people actually started to like it, rather than just
pretending to
because they still spelled MS like M$, and it's grown from there.
Similarly, Chrome appeared (thanks to webkit) and has grown because it's
a fast, lightweight
browser and perhaps because they were rather intelligent thinking about
how to
let people install and update it without needing to be administrator so
maybe
they got onto a few work PCs they wouldn't have otherwise.
For all the fuss made about antitrust this and that, the reason people
stopped using IE was because it sucked and there were years
of headline breaking security issues in it.
But mostly because the alternatives got their act together.
That said, I do accept that many new players may click and join a server
asap,
and will use the 'official servers' box checked.
But, firstly, I don't see that as any different from Valve looking at the
number of hours someone has played and putting them on one of their
servers which they've done for a long time afaiaa and secondly,
I don't accept that gamers won't explore any and all options that
are in the game.
Look at the cardiac arrhythmia's suffered on a forum if a new game fails
to have a setting for every possible
graphical possibility "Ewww. it's a console port...I can't disable
reflective ambient occluded shading!" - this
is hardly indicative of an audience who only ever use defaults is it?
PC gamers will explore what TF2 has to offer, they won't just
play koth on valve servers if that happens to be the default if
you don't read or select anything else.
Plus people, especially young people, experience games in a social
context - i.e their
friends play and tell them about it and they learn about other modes and
alternatives that way too. Perhaps you should try making friends
with the community.
But, you have to offer these people something, otherwise I can't really
see you have a point anyway - and I mean something the players
care about, not something you think makes it better and maybe
I'm wrong, maybe I'm the only person connecting to all these
servers and thinking "well I play here sometimes, but it sucks",
but if I'm not, perhaps you shouldn't take your player base
for granted and assume their mere presence means your servers
are good.
--
Dan
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